Episode 181: Environmental degradation, capitalism, and imperialism with Jason W Moore

The Sustainability Agenda

In this fascinating, hard hitting interview, Jason Moore talks about the intertwining relations between environmental degradation, capitalism, imperialism, and climate change-stressing the need to recognize the role of imperialis--and counter-insurgency across the past century to advance climate justice. He argues it is naïve to believe that eco-socialism can be achieved through parliamentary majority alone and underscores the importance of understanding a century of struggles between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces. Jason sees the present era as a moment of transition, signaling a break with American uni-polar hegemony, a period of political possibility and revolts, and calls for a more dialectical way of thinking to establish connections between fractured social movements. Finally, Jason talks about the exploitation of the Global South, labeling it as a new phase of green imperialism, and criticizes the neglect of imperialism’s role in discussions about environmental transitions.

Jason W. Moore is an environmental historian and historical geographer at BINGampton University, where he is professor of sociology and leads the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is author or editor, most recently, of Capitalism in the Web of Life , Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. His books and essays on environmental history, capitalism, and social theory have been widely recognized, including the Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2003), the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on the Political Economy of the World-System (American Sociological Association, 2002 for articles, and 2015 for Web of Life), and the Byres and Bernstein Prize in Agrarian Change (2011).